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Nation of Airports 02.01
Elisabeth Battrie read tarot cards in the mornings before work, not religiously but often. Her friend Missy Devereaux had taught her the cards over a few nights of drinks, not long after they met last year. Back when Elisabeth's job required travel and hustle she dealt quick three-card spreads the moment she woke -- a small helping of the future to mull over in the shower, bullet points on the day to come.
Now Elisabeth didn't travel and her days felt all the same. The silk-wrapped tarot deck lived on her dining table, not in her flight bag. She read the cards after yoga and her shower but before coffee. Usually her tarot readings were crappy Staff cards, sadly appropriate to her crappy job. This Monday morning, however, her cards were intriguing: The Consultant; Brand Assistant; Failure upside-down. Enlightenment at a time of stagnation, perhaps a new partnership, or even a new inspiring colleague.
Intriguing, but a lot to ask of a Monday.
She took the coffee with her on the drive from Washington to her office in suburban Reston, twenty miles away. Elisabeth liked to get out of the house quickly in the morning. Her Foggy Bottom apartment was undeniably sweet, sublet fully-furnished from a Foreign Service officer with seventeen more months in Seoul. It was decorated in 80's modern, gray tones and chrome, welded sculptures and antique rugs and original derivative abstract art. Elisabeth had come to hate every stick of it. Some mornings she fantasized trashing it, taking a sledgehammer to the whole fucking aquarium.
Elisabeth Battrie was thirty. She had good Latin looks, wavy brown hair, large brown eyes, copper skin and her mother's square Brazilian jaw. Trim build. Not tall. She worked for Straightforward Consulting, since February in Client Support, where she provided public-relations and lobbying guidance to medium-sized industrial and agribusiness clients. It sucked. Originally a Nebraska office that implemented automation for manufacturers, Client Support had been relocated twice in three reorganizations. Since moving to the Washington suburbs it had tried to abandon the grubby work of produce and cargo in favor of airier corporate services like succession planning and astroturf lobbying. It wasn't working out well. What clients they retained seemed to be simply too stupid to fire them.
On her slow drive through Arlington she listened to satellite radio news and decided to ignore the reading. The day proved her correct. In the morning she worked on a public statement and a friends-of website for a Kentucky tool and die manufacturer catching flack about the plan to move its factory to Shenzhen. It was make-work, mostly cut-and-pasted from other releases. The rest of the division was having an equally slow morning, the rows of beige cubicles outside her office so quiet that Elisabeth didn't bother closing her door.
After lunch, the monthly division meeting in Feynman, a windowless gray conference room. Everyone had to bring their own office chairs, in a clanking humiliating parade down the floor's central hallway, to listen to project reports from the division teams. The longest came from Tiffany, a squat dyke with a faint reedy voice, who led a group developing a supply-chain management system for a Midwestern ethanol producer. For her report Tiffany read the programmers' release notes, adding just enough words to masquerade as speech. "We did a fix on bug thirteen-one-twenty, which really solved the exception handling issues." Elisabeth bit the inside of her cheek periodically to stay awake. Elisabeth had no team and never made a report.
Her boss was Marcus Medev, a slimy former salesman who had taken over the division only weeks before her reassignment. "Our strategy depends on confidence," he said, "confidence that we can meet the client's needs, and confidence that the client needs us." Marcus didn't seem confident today, didn't even seem to be fully awake. His skin looked yellow. Elisabeth drifted away on his monotonous empty praise, great-team-important-work-great-important-teamwork-team. The meeting ended with this month's Office Birthdays, always a pair of huge flat cakes from the nearby warehouse wholesale store. Elisabeth forced down a cube of dry devil's-food with chalky icing, looked out the window at the gorgeous day, and decided to flee.
Too many people had the same idea. Traffic crawled along hilly Reston Toll Road, jammed by a distant accident that had brought three emergency vehicles up the shoulder. Gridlock at four o'clock, with ten more miles to Washington. Elisabeth slowly see-sawed clutch and gas-pedal and made a face at herself in the rear-view mirror. Just another office grunt, in Washington fucking traffic. Two months of this. Soon she wouldn't be able to tell herself apart from the rest of them. At least it was warm enough to put the top down. She fumbled for the cigarette case in her purse and took out a half-finished joint from Friday. She lit it and took a long drag. It was stale and made her cough. She took another, forcing her lungs to deal with it, and settled back in her seat.
A half-hour later she passed the accident, a sedan crushed between two pickups. From then on traffic was light. The convertible breeze and the lovely afternoon light eased her bitter mood. By five-thirty she sat on the balcony of her apartment, looking out over the Kennedy Center and the Potomac River. She drank a rum-diet-cola in the still warm air while paging through a fashion magazine. Elisabeth wasn't an extravagant dresser, and Washington conservative in style. She liked picking up occasional accents, slight bright notions to vary her wardrobe. Today instead of the clothes Elisabeth noted the models' faces, the poses of intense desire,false but compelling. They reminded her of when her days had a sense of purpose, when her own face took on looks like that.
She rolled a joint. Elisabeth currently smoked pot from Martin, a skatepunk with braided beaded blond hair and bad teeth. One night last fall she'd gone with friends to a party in a cavernous Northeast nightclub. She danced for hours, rolling hard on ecstasy and drunk too on some rich groping asshole's blanc de noirs. Martin found her at the bar and slid a tiny baggie under her hand, stapled to a business card with his phone number. "It's called Fleeber," he shouted. "I think you'll like it." In her bath later that night (really by then morning, dawn light from the bedroom just starting to rival the candles) the sample and a submersible vibrator brought her to a peak almost like death. She bought a half-ounce a month these days. Even that was getting boring.
Elisabeth recalled a conversation some months ago, during a late night drunk in a rotating rooftop bar with Steve and Xiumei, two biotech analysts from the Atlanta office. "What if you could make a drug that had an inconsistent high?" asked Steve, a bald pudgy dark brown man with a resonant voice. "Sometimes you get euphoric, sometimes you get bummed, sometimes nothing. Every time you take it, a crap shoot. It would be huge." Behind him the window crawled past a massive highway junction, schools of headlights moving in all directions. They'd talked for hours, about changes in brain chemistry in the children of abusive parents, nanotube capsules to regulate drug absorption rates. Why couldn't she get projects like that now? Or even colleagues like that? Who had she pissed off?
Elisabeth lit the joint and went inside for another drink. Her reflection in the sunburst mirror above her sofa was tired and defeated. She looked old and she still had zits. It was all this sitting still. She was atrophied, rotting inside out.
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